Dec. 11.  It seems scarcely possible that it is but one week since I wrote those words above, yet the date stares me in the face, and tells me that but seven days and seven nights have passed since then.  It seems to me as if all my past life held less of emotion, of sensation, less of living, than this one week; and what absolute, uncompromising pain it has all been!  It seems to me as if I had been through every stage of suffering in succession; yet to what does it all amount? what has caused it all? what has racked me with all these various gradations of torture?  Just this:  since that night, that triumphant, happy night, I have neither heard from nor seen Mr. Lawrence.  Silence, unbroken silence, has been between us.  I have borne it, but oh how badly!—­not calmly or with quiet self-control and strength; but I have borne it with passionate out-cry and restless struggles.  I have sobbed myself to sleep at night:  I have roamed aimlessly about during the day, or lain on a lounge, book in hand, pretending to read, but in reality listening, waiting, longing to hear his step, his knock, to have some message, some sign, come to me from him.  Then it has seemed to me as if there was but one other human creature in the world, and that was he—­as if all the manifold needs and wants, losses and gains, of humanity had no longer the slightest meaning for me.  I have no sense of any ambition, any aim, any obligation pressing upon me.  I find nothing within myself to feed upon but a few pale memories of him, and my whole future seems concentred in his existence.  I do not think I can bear to live as I am now.  It is all profoundly dark to me.  Why does he not come?  I can think of no possible explanation—­none.  I am resolved to think it out to an end, and then act:  it is this passiveness which is killing me.

I am resolved:  I will write, and will ask him to come to me, and when he comes I will say what I feel.  Some mistaken hesitation is keeping him away.  I will say, “We love one another:  let us unite our lives and live them together, yoked in all exercise of noble end.”

Letter from Henry Lawrence to George Manning.

DECEMBER 11.

DEAR GEORGE:  I will begin by telling the truth, and here it is:  I am in a scrape.  I know you won’t think much of the simple fact, but the scrape is very different from any of my former ones, and I don’t see how I can get out of it honorably.  I can see you raise your eyebrows, and hear you say with an incredulous smile, “Why, Harry, I have heard you ridicule honor a thousand times where women are concerned, and of course this scrape involves a woman.”  You are right there—­it does; or rather a woman has involved me, and there lies the scrape.  As for honor, I laugh at most of the things I believe in, just because it’s the fashion of the day—­and I belong to the day I live in—­not to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve.  Then, too, sometimes one finds that logically one thinks a thing, an idea, a feeling absurd, and yet when one’s life comes into collision with it, somehow up springs something within you which I suppose might be called an instinct, and forces you to respect and cherish and uphold the very feeling or idea which you have always ridiculed.